Google Inc. has revealed its new virtual reality tool Tour Creator, a platform for students to create and share VR tours using 360-degree photos or Street View content to immerse viewers in both familiar and faraway places.

The VR creation tool, announced and demonstrated by the company Wednesday during its annual I/O developer conference, combines 360-degree photos from cameras, still pictures, content from Google’s Street View mapping product and other media into one seamless VR experience.

The impetus behind the product is to allow users to create feature-rich, professional VR content without a steep learning curve. That could make it ideal for students, educators and everyday people who want to tell and share stories using VR.

“The technology gets out of the way and enables students to focus on crafting fantastic visual stories,” said Charlie Reisinger, a school technology director in Pennsylvania.

Each part of a Tour created by the tool uses a 360-degree photo, which the user then views using a VR headset such as Google Daydream or Samsung Gear VR, but it can also be viewed in 2-D using a smartphone or a browser on a computer.

During the VR tour, parts of the 360-degree photo can be “called out” using highlights, which pop out rich content photos that can include a higher resolution image along with text. That can be especially useful for extremely distant objects such as mountains or other features. It also adds an extra layer of content on top of the still image, allowing creators to add more context.

For example, in a tour made by Chris Betcher, viewers are greeted with a tour of “cool places to visit in Australia.” The first place is the flat, table-land surrounding Uluru, a massive sandstone rock formation that covers an area of 3.3 square kilometers. The location is sacred to the local aboriginal people, whose ancestors have ancient sites around the feature.

Once created, a Tour is extremely easy to share using Poly, Google’s library of 3-D content.

Later this year, Google plans to allow users to import Tours into Google Expeditions, a feature released in 2017 with an Android app designed for educators to bring rich VR field trips into the classroom. The content in Google Expeditions is professionally made with an eye to the needs of educators.

The addition of Tour Creator puts that same power in the hands of students, who can take their own experience in their local environment and then share it with the world. “Being able to work with Tour Creator has been an awesome experience,” said Jennifer Newton, a school media coordinator in Georgia. “It has allowed our students from a small town in Georgia to tell our story to the world.”

Of course, educators and students are not the only people to take advantage of Tour Creator. Real estate professionals have also put the technology to use to quickly produce VR tours of for-sale properties.

Google Tours can be viewed on any device – not just a VR headset, although the experience is far more profound that way – and there are dozens of tours already available. For more tours to watch, head on over to the Google Poly “Tours” page.

For some other examples of what to watch (includes Google Expeditions content), check out these Tours:  the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Princeton University in New Jersey, El Cristo de Oreña in Spain, Byodo-In Temple in Hawai’i and finally this one of the solar system.

Image: Google